Finding and hiring employees is a task that impacts most modern businesses. It is important for an employer to find employees that “fit” open positions. Criteria for fitting an open position may include skills necessary to perform job functions. Employers may also want to evaluate potential employees for mental and emotional stability, ability to work well with others, ability to assume leadership roles, ambition, attention to detail, problem solving, etc.
However, the processes associated with finding employees can be expensive and time consuming for an employer. Such processes can include evaluating resumes and cover letters, telephone interviews with candidates, in-person interviews with candidates, drug testing, skill testing, sending rejection letters, offer negotiation, training new employees, etc. A single employee candidate can be very costly in terms of man-hours needed to evaluate and interact with the candidate before the candidate is hired.
Computers and computing systems can be used to automate some of these activities. For example, many businesses now have on-line recruiting tools that facilitate job postings, resume submissions, preliminary evaluations, etc. Additionally, some computing systems include functionality for allowing candidates to participate in “virtual” on-line interviews.
While computing tools have automated interview response gathering, there is still a lot of effort spent in evaluating responses. Often, respondents may be evaluated individually and ranked in the aggregate while side-by-side comparisons of specifics for different candidates may be difficult. For example, an evaluator, to compare specific answers of interviewees side by side, would need to search through stored responses for one candidate, access responses for another candidate, and search through the responses for the other candidate to find corresponding data needed for comparisons.
The job of interviewers and candidate reviewers is to determine if candidates are skilled and have the qualifications required for a particular job. In the process of doing this, they compare and contrast the qualifications of candidates—often reviewing and comparing candidate responses to particular questions or tasks. As noted, the comparison process is often difficult as interviews are reviewed linearly (from beginning to end) and comparing responses for each candidate to a specific question is tedious and requires reordering and cross comparing. The result is that responses are often not evaluated equally, fairly or in light of other candidate responses.
Evaluation of candidates can be a very subjective process that is highly dependent on individual interviewers. However, large organizations may wish to remove or minimize subjectivity to maximize recruiting efforts, avoid charges of discrimination, or for other reasons. Various schemes exist to this end, but each of these schemes approaches the solution in different ways. Thus, an employer that makes a commitment to a provider of an automated interview and/or evaluation system is often constrained to that provider's solution.
The subject matter claimed herein is not limited to embodiments that solve any disadvantages or that operate only in environments such as those described above. Rather, this background is only provided to illustrate one exemplary technology area where some embodiments described herein may be practiced.